Winners to watch for when Pulitzer Prizes are announced Monday

With its once-plentiful Pulitzer Prize juror leaks now plugged, handicapping the year’s premier journalism awards is harder these days. To predict who and what will win Pulitzer stardom now involves scanning what most think of as lesser constellations: contests younger than the 96-year-old Pulitzers with winners already announced. Among those winners, one often finds work with that special glow that the Pulitzer board loves.

Secrecy pervades the Pulitzer organization, whose journalist-jurors met the last weekend in February at Columbia University, which administers the prizes. So there will have been relatively little buzz when Pulitzer administrator Sig Gissler steps into the Graduate School of Journalism’s fabled World Room at 3 p.m. Monday to announce winners and finalists in the 14 journalism categories, along with seven for arts, letters and music.

Bloomberg’s “The Fed’s Trillion-Dollar Secret,” about bank bail-out loans, and its “Wired for Repression,” which looked at surveillance technology being sold by U.S. companies to repressive regimes around the world;

ProPublica projects that included “Dollars for Docs,” about secret drug-company payments to physicians; “Presidential Pardons,” in collaboration with the Washington Post; and Paul Kiel and Olga Pierce’s exposure of failures that contributed to the home-foreclosure crisis.

All this work likely was represented among the entries reviewed by the 14 Pulitzer jury panels that quietly decided which 42 (three per category) to forward to board members for their final vote this week.

“As far as I can tell,” wrote the Pulitzers’ Gissler in an email, “jurors have impressively honored their pledge of confidentiality.” He said little else in answer to questions, except to note that entries have “been running about 1,100 a year in recent years” and that he would announce the 2012 number on Monday when Pulitzers are awarded for Public Service; Breaking News; Investigative, Explanatory, Local, National and International Reporting; Feature Writing; Commentary; Criticism; Editorial Writing; Cartooning; and News and Feature Photography.

To be a good Pulitzer prognosticator requires more than aggregation skills. Attention must be paid to special considerations facing the 18 voting Pulitzer board members: top editors and publishers from a range of news organizations, along with a handful of educators. Since 1917, after all, the board has been charged with picking the best of the best – what the Oscars (begun a dozen years after the Pulitzers) are to motion pictures.

One such 2012 consideration may relate to its controversial decision not to name a Breaking News winner last year. That suggests a mission to “restore” that important category. Work honored by other award programs includes the Arizona Republic’s coverage of the shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords, and the Joplin Globe’s coverage of a devastating tornado in its southwestern corner of Missouri.

The pressure continues to mount, as well, for acknowledging more online journalism, especially among the growing number of entries published online only, or representing collaborations between Internet-based and print outlets. (Work done primarily for magazines or broadcast is barred from Pulitzer consideration.) Critics say the Pulitzers should do a better job of recognizing projects that reflect the type of online journalism that today’s readers increasingly view on computer or tablet screens, or tap from smartphones.

Other online journalism honored so far this year includes two projects from investigative nonprofit California Watch: “On Shaky Ground,” which exposed serious flaws in seismic safety compliance and oversight at public schools, and “Decoding Prime,” illustrating cases of waste, fraud and abuse in Medicare reimbursements, and generally throughout the health-care system.

When it comes to citing the work of established giants of print, the Pulitzers can face controversy, too. In the four years since The Wall Street Journal was acquired by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., the paper has won only one Pulitzer – to editorial writer Joseph Rago last year. (It had 2011 finalists in Feature Writing, Explanatory, National and International.) In the nine years leading up to the acquisition of the paper, the Journal or its staffers won 15 Pulitzers, and were finalists eight more times.

Journal work honored with other awards so far this year has included the “Disabled System” series by Damian Paletta, about mismanagement of the Social Security Disability Insurance system; “Inside Track,” a series of articles examining new means of insider trading involving Washington officials and savvy investors; and “The End of Privacy,” about government and corporate tracking of individuals through their electronic devices.

In addition to the Journal, The New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times comprise the “big four” of traditional Pulitzer powerhouses – all submitting a raft of entries each year, and often appearing somewhere among the final 14 winners and finalists. Their performance among other award programs so far this year has seemed relatively muted, although any number of their staffers still could find Pulitzer favor, of course.

One trait displayed by the Pulitzers over the years has been a penchant for Pulitzer surprises: acknowledging work, often by small news organizations, that may have been largely unheralded. Such picks are hard to predict, of course. But prior to awarding last year’s Public Service prize to the Los Angeles Times for the celebrated work of reporters Ruben Vives and Jeff Gottlieb in exposing governmental abuses in the city of Bell, Calif., the 2010 and 2009 gold medals went to the smaller Bristol, Va., Herald-Courier, and the Las Vegas Sun, respectively, for investigations that were largely off the national radar.

Among the small publications whose work has been praised in other contests this year:

The Norfolk, Va., Virginian-Pilot’s Corinne Reilly was a Scripps Howard winner for “A Chance in Hell,” a series about a combat hospital in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

Florida’s Palm Beach Post won an IRE award for a breaking news story that found details about a suspect in the killing of two children, and raised questions about failures in state and private agencies.

The tiny Advertiser Democrat, of Norway, Me., which explored shocking conditions in low-income housing after a rooming-house fire exposed blatant disregard for health and safety, was a choice for a Polk award.

If that interest in youth continues to hold sway with the Pulitzer board, it could augur well for Harrisburg Patriot-News reporter Sara Ganim, who is 24.

What do you think has been the best journalism overlooked by judges? Tweet your picks using the hashtag #bestoverlooked.

Correction: This article originally gave the Patriot-News an extra win. It did not receive an IRE award for its reporting on Sandusky. The original version of the article also misspelled Joseph Rago’s name.

Interesting about the WSJ’s drop in Pulitzers since the Murdoch takeover.Clearly his name has a negative connotation, and the massive hacking scandal will no doubt seal Murdoch’s fate forever. Wonder if the voters will feel the same toward the NY Daily News now that former NoTW(?) editor is there.